Oh, for the love of God, give these poor casual gamers an option to cakewalk through a game where you're never supposed to have an easy go no matter how powerful your character is! All they want is FUN! Let them have their FUN time, playing with FUN features, let them burst with FUN! Or else I dunno what is going to happen! They are ENTITLED to it, goddamit!

*clears throat*

Seriously though.

With all the energy some people have invested in arguing why this game should be changed fundamentally from the original concept, they could have already mastered Dark Souls.

Mind, I know where they are coming from. I had my doubts, I loath checkpoints, I despise no-free-save, I dislike respawns, I detest grinding, and I don't generally like to go up against the same frustrating encounter a zillion times. But I watched some vids that were dripping with atmosphere and badassitude (yes, that's a word). I listened to people I trust who said I should give it a go.

Now I'm hooked. And I don't mind the controls, the bonfire checkpoint system, the frustration when something gets the better of me and I lose Souls (experience) permanently, I don't mind the difficulty, nothing. Because when I do come over these challenges, it is a feeling I haven't felt for a long time now. I can't go to sleep after I play, I'm so on edge. In a good way. And all the while I'm part of this living world (well, sorta, more like… dying world really), where my actions really have meaning, where nothing and noone tells me what I can and can't do, and I need to decide for myself about it. And there is also lore aplenty for those who want to dig deeper and theorize about it, and it's really awesome.

Do yourselves a favor and give it a try.

Or if you really can't compromise in order to be given a real treat, if you don't want to feel that you are really doing something worthy in your game-time, just leave it be. This game is not for you. And it wouldn't be the same experience if it was done any other way. Play it, and you WILL understand.

That said, there are a few things I'd like to clarify now that I have spent ~150 hours of gametime.

1) Dark Souls is not a very difficult game. You can MAKE it difficult by trying to do extra stuff, like wearing certain equipment for RP reasons, trying to get extra drops from a boss by cutting its tail, playing in human to test your mettle against invading players, and so on. Or you can make it much easier for you, with things like reading about a boss on the game wiki, summoning other players to help you out, or optimizing your gear and tactics for a battle. Difficulty is implicit in the game design, and even though you don't have a slide for it, you can pretty much change it vastly.

2) The keyboard mouse controls are not horrid. It's a lie. With the simple mod for the PC it is much more efficient than the controller because of the mouse-camera-look. I'm speaking out of experience. Okay, granted, you do need a mouse with at least 3 buttons. As for controls being unintuitive, I also disagree. Some minor things, like character sheet and menus are oddly mapped, but the most important keys are mapped to the most logical places, and you can also remap them with the same mod.

ON TOPIC!
As you'd expect, I am very glad they finally address this, because there was a fear it would become a Souls game by name only with the ease-of-access. Let's hope they live up to this promise.